As it is generally known, the World Wide Web is a major service provided over the Internet, using Web server computer systems that store and disseminate Web pages. Web pages are HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) documents containing text, graphics, animations and videos, and are accessible via Web browser application programs such as Internet Explorer®, Netscape®, Safari, Opera and Firefox. The browser program renders Web pages it obtains via HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) on a display screen. A collection of Web pages makes up a Web site. Weblogs, or Blogs, are an increasingly popular type of Web site. Weblogs are an example of personalized, on-line electronic journals. Weblogs typically contain dated entries, usually in reverse chronological order, about a particular topic or individual. Weblogs are associated with and written by one or more contributors, sometimes referred to as Bloggers, and referred to herein as authors. Entries (also referred to herein as “postings” or “posts”) contain content defined by a Weblog author, and commentary by other users about the entry, or links to such commentary. A set of links to other Weblogs, sometimes referred to as a Blogroll, and a search facility are often also included in a Weblog.
The popularity of Weblogs has increased since development applications such as Pitas, Blogger and GrokSoup were released. Template-based software has made it increasingly easy to add entries to a Weblog, while hosting services have made it easy to create and maintain a Weblog. Various implementations of Weblogs can be found on the Web. Examples of Web sites currently containing Weblog implementations include www.blogger.com, www.userland.com, www.socialtext.com.
Though postings in Weblogs are typically created by one, or a small group of authors, many Weblog authors and other users also subscribe to, read, and enter comments to postings in multiple Weblogs. For example, Weblog subscriptions are often provided using the RSS (Rich Site Summary) format for syndicating Web content. Additionally, Weblog users often enter links to Weblog postings in Weblogs other than the one on which the postings were originally made. Such links are sometimes referred to as “trackbacks”. Trackbacks related to a given posting are often made available to readers of the original posting through the Weblog user interface. As noted above, Weblog authors also often maintain a publicly available list of other Weblogs they find interesting, referred to as a Blogroll. These and other features relating authors and other users through different Weblogs allow Weblog users to form social networks, some of which have become popular and influential.
In existing systems, it is difficult for a user to identify social networks defined through Weblogs, or to identify influential Weblogs within such social networks. This problem results in part from the large and growing number of Weblogs, and also from the limited features of tools that are currently available. The most common tools today provide Weblog listings identifying Weblogs 1) with the most recent posts, 2) with the most comments over a given time period, or 3) with the most hits over a given time period. Some Weblog implementations also list newly created Weblogs. Additionally, users can performs searches via existing search tools, such as Google™ and the like, to find Weblogs or Weblog posts containing specified keywords of interests. However, none of these tools help users identify social networks defined by Weblogs, or influential Weblogs within such networks.
Some existing systems have attempted to provide visualizations of Weblogs, in some cases using specific approaches based on what are known as “treemap” visual constructs. However, existing Weblog visualization systems do not address identification or visualization of social networks created by groups of Weblogs. Instead, they focus on characteristics such as the relative size of Weblogs or Weblog posts, the number of comments to a post, or the recentness of a post. For example, in one existing system, top level rectangles within a display object are used to represent each Weblog, with the size of each rectangle determined by the number of posts in the corresponding Weblog. Inner rectangles are used to represent individual posts, and each have a size determined by the length of the corresponding post. Another existing system uses inner rectangles to represent posts, with the inner rectangle size determined by the number of related comments. None of these systems includes the features needed to provide a user with a convenient and rich user interface display object or objects that represents the social networks within a set of Weblogs, or the influence of specific Weblogs on such social networks.
For the above reasons and others it would therefore be desirable to have a new system for representing a set of on-line journals that enables users to quickly visualize social network communities within the journal set, as well as the significance of individual journals within the communities.